Philosophy of medicine

According to recent approaches in the philosophy of medicine, biomedicine should be replaced or complemented by a humanistic medical model. Two humanistic approaches, narrative medicine and the phenomenology of medicine, have grown particularly popular in recent decades. This paper first suggests that these humanistic criticisms of biomedicine are insufficient. A central problem is that both approaches seem to offer a straw man definition of biomedicine. It then argues that the subsequent definition of humanism found in these approaches is problematically reduced to a compassionate or psychological understanding...

After the collapse of the Arab rule, the Arab territorial expanses and cultural heritage were taken over by the Turks. Although scientific progress in the Turkish period slowed down due to numerous unfavorable political-economic and other circumstances. Thanks to the Turks, Arabic culture and useful Islamic principles expanded to the territory of our homeland of Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). Significant role in the transfer of Arabic pharmaceutical knowledge was also attributed to the Sephardic Jews who, with their arrival, continued to perform their attar activities, which were largely based on Arab achievements...

What is an organ and what is an organ system? According to the 'standard' hierarchical model of physiology, each living organism comprises of organ systems including those that offer sensory and control functions (nervous system), energy accumulation (gastrointestinal system), internal dissipation (circulatory system) and mobility (musculoskeletal system). Each organ system in turn is comprised of individual organs. This taxonomy has conceptual flaws as not every organ has a single organ system function but may participate in a myriad of physiological functions...

Medical history explains that Persian physicians used scientific methods based on clinical experiences and observations for treatment from pre-Islamic time (before 637 AD) and centuries later (in the Islamic era). Rhazes was one of the Persian physicians acknowledged as a pharmacist, chemist and prominent scientific writer on various subjects of medicine and philosophy. In this study, we aimed to investigate clinical experiences, as well as the ethical and critical views of Rhazes in medical practice. Rhazes promoted ethics in the medical profession...

BACKGROUND: Expertise has been a contentious concept in Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). Especially in the early days of the movement, expertise was taken to be exactly what EBM was rebelling against-the authoritarian pronouncements about "best" interventions dutifully learned in medical schools, sometimes with dire consequences. Since then, some proponents of EBM have tried various ways of reincorporating the idea of expertise into EBM, with mixed results. However, questions remain...

In recent decades, a disciplinary and subdisciplinary proliferation has triggered both in the medical fields and science in general. This trend may be partially explained by two diachronic, dialectically interconnected facts: the deepening of technical, social and international division of labor in the globalized capitalist world, and the triumph of the reductionist program, mainly developed by the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. This paper aims to deepen the debate on the intricate links between medicine, biology, philosophy, reductionism and complex thought, by using two examples: a case report of current medicine and the situation experienced by a famous American scientist, Stephen Jay Gould, about his first cancer, an abdominal mesothelioma...

The forming and development of traditional reinforcing and reducing method of acupuncture was rooted in traditional culture of China, and was based on the ancients' special understanding of nature, life and diseases, therefore its principle and methods were inevitably influenced by philosophy culture and medicine concept at that time. With deep study on Inner Canon of Huangdi and representative reinforcing and reducing method of acupuncture, the implied ideological concept, including contradiction view and profit-loss view in ancient dialectic, yin-yang balance theory, concept of life flow, monophyletic theory of qi , theory of existence of disease-evil, yin-yang astrology theory, theory of inter-promotion of five elements, were summarized and analyzed...

When a paradigm starts to show signs of failure to cope with significant questions in any basic/applied branch of human knowledge, there come on the scene those who have perused the related literature enough to either answer those major questions according to the established paradigm or proffer a (wholly) new way of looking at things. In the latter case, the history of science tells us, a paradigm shift takes place. Modern medicine cannot be proven to be totally disconnected from its traditional roots. Where traditional medicine came to give its place to present-day conventional medicine, a number of humanistic aspects of healing, in addition to some axioms of old wisdom, were actually lost...

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was an observational study on African-American males in Tuskegee, Alabama between 1932 and 1972. The U. S. Public Health Service ran this study on more than 300 people without notifying the participants about their disease nor treating them even after the introduction of penicillin. The study included recording the progress of disease and performing an autopsy on the deaths. This paper explores historical backgrounds enabled this infamous study, and discusses three driving forces behind the Tuskegee Study...

Evidence-based medicine, first described in 1992, offers a clear, systematic, and scientific approach to the practice of medicine. Recently, the non-evidence-based practice of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has been increasing in the United States and around the world, particularly at medical institutions known for providing rigorous evidence-based care. The use of CAM may cause harm to patients through interactions with evidence-based medications or if patients choose to forego evidence-based care...

In this essay, we defend the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial and try to put some limits on the role schemata should play in designing clinical research studies. Our presentation is structured as a response to de Freitas and Pietrobon (de Freitas, R. S. and R. Pietrobon. 2007. Whoever could get rid of the context of discovery/context of justification dichotomy? A proposal based on recent developments in clinical research. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 32:25-42.) who identified the CONSORT statement as a schema that would have, had it existed at the time, ruled out the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial of 1954 in favor of a completely randomized controlled clinical trial (RCT)...

During medical training, students obtain enough skills and knowledge. However, medical ethics accomplishes its goals when, together with training medical courses, it guides students behavior towards morality so that ethics-oriented medical practice is internalized. Medical ethics is a branch of applied ethics which tries to introduce ethics into physicians' practice and ethical decisions; thus, it necessitates the behavior to be ethical. Therefore, when students are being trained, they need to be supplied with those guidelines which turn ethical instructions into practice to the extent possible...

Unlike the strategy of cognitive regulation that relies heavily on the top-down control function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which was recently found may be critically impaired in stressful situations, traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine views different types of emotionality as having mutual promotion and counteraction (MPMC) relationships, implying a novel approach that requires less cognition to emotional regulation. Actually, our previous studies have indicated that anger responses could be successfully regulated via the induction of sadness, and this efficiency could not be influenced by stress, thus providing evidences for the hypothesis of "sadness counteracts anger" (SCA) proposed by the MPMC theory of emotionality (Zhan et al...

Clinical judgement is a central and longstanding issue in the philosophy of medicine which has generated significant interest over the past few decades. In this article, we explore different approaches to clinical judgement articulated in the literature, focusing in particular on data-driven, mathematical approaches which we contrast with narrative, virtue-based approaches to clinical reasoning. We discuss the tension between these different clinical epistemologies and further explore the implications of big data and machine learning for a philosophy of clinical judgement...

Background: In the pre-Hellenistic period, the concept of medicine was not well-defined. Usually, a disease was considered as a divine punishment and its treatment was devolved to the priests who asked for healing from the divinities. The only job that could be compared to medical practice was a kind of itinerant medicine, derived from the Egyptian therapeutic tradition based only on practical experience and performed by people that knew a number of remedies, mostly vegetable, but without any theoretical bases about the possible mechanisms of action...

Introduction: Palliative care knowledge is being given meager importance in the curriculum of medical and other allied medical sciences. It is vital that all health care practitioners including medical, pharmacy, physiotherapy and nursing are aware and apply the best principles of palliative care. Aim: To assess the awareness of palliative care among undergraduate students of medical, nursing, pharmacy and physiotherapy. Materials and Methods: The study population included total of 200 students...

INTRODUCTION: Proof of professional specific academic attainment is embedded within the Joint Committee on Surgical Training 2013 general surgery curriculum, mandating that all higher general surgical trainees (HST) obtain three peer-reviewed publications to qualify for Certification of Completion of Training. Yet, Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) has been associated with a trend away from the gold standard postgraduate credentials of higher degrees by research. This study aimed to evaluate the academic achievements of a post-MMC UK Deanery HST cohort to determine what additional benefits higher degree study might confer...

The importance of how disease and illness are conceptualised lies in the fact that such definition is paramount to understand the boundaries and scope of responsibility associated with medical work. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the interplay of these understandings in shaping the nature of medical work, philosophically, and in practice. We first discuss the emergence of the biopsychosocial model as an attempt to both challenge and broaden the traditional biomedical model. Then, we outline the main criticisms associated with the biopsychosocial model and note a range of contributions addressing the shortcomings of the model as initially formulated...

People with Sami and Norwegian background are frequent users of traditional folk medicine (TM). Traditional healing, such as religious prayers of healing (reading) and the laying on of hands, are examples of commonly used modalities. The global aim of this study is to examine whether health personnel's knowledge, attitudes and experiences of traditional healing affect their clinical practice. Semi-structured individual interviews (n=32) and focus group interviews (n=2) were conducted among health personnel in two communities in Northern Norway...

BACKGROUND: Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a set of technologies that are of increasing interest to researchers. BCI has been proposed as assistive technology for individuals who are non-communicative or paralyzed, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or spinal cord injury. The technology has also been suggested for enhancement and entertainment uses, and there are companies currently marketing BCI devices for those purposes (e.g., gaming) as well as health-related purposes (e...